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Abstract

This study examines the use of Russian and Kazakh languages in contemporary Kazakhstani films, focusing on code-switching patterns and their sociolinguistic meanings within the national cinema. Our research question concerns how the Kazakh identity is constructed through bilingual films. In doing so, it investigates bilingualism through Kazakh-Russian language alternation in films produced in Kazakhstan between 2021 and 2025. The corpus includes commercial, independent, and state-funded productions screened at cinema theatres that depict everyday communication in multilingual urban and rural contexts. Our study compares Kazakhstani films produced before and after the Russo-Ukrainian war to gauge recent developments in post-independent Kazakhstan. The use of both languages in these films reflects broader sociolinguistic dynamics, such as language policy and the symbolic status of Kazakh and Russian in public life. Contrary to interpretations that consider bilingual dialogue merely as a reflection of everyday speech, this analysis demonstrates that filmmakers strategically employ code-switching to construct character identity and negotiate cultural belonging within a post-Soviet framework. The study is grounded in textual and discourse analyses of selected 11 Kazakhstani films, as well as in content analysis and in-depth interviews with Kazakhstani filmmakers. Our findings confirm our hypothesis that Russian is used in a high-diglossic variety – a high-status, formal situation – in contemporary Kazakhstani films, while Kazakh is used in low-diglossic settings – low-status, informal contexts. Such comparisons in the nation’s films show how Kazakh and Russian are used and what social meanings they carry, as language choices are deliberate tools for storytelling and identity.

Keywords: film studies, code switching, language alternation, bilingualism, Kazakh cinema

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Abstract

Sergei Bodrov’s Nomad (2005) and Vladimir Khotinenko’s 1612 (2007), were created as historical nation-building projects for Kazakhstan and Russia, respectively. Both had enormous budgets (34 and 12 million dollars, respectively), and both failed at the box office. While the former is an outward-facing film, positioned to rehabilitate the image of the Kazakh nation both at home and abroad and dedicated to the appearance of Ablai Khan and the defeat of the Dzhungars, the latter is aimed at a domestic audience, created to popularize the Day of National Unity, a holiday introduced in 2005 to celebrate the end of the interregnum known as the Time of Troubles, the expulsion of Polish-Lithuanian forces, and the election of the first Romanov tsar, which followed soon after. Despite these and other significant differences, I will draw upon Anthony Smith’s (1999) concepts of “Gastronomic Nationalism” (163-171) and “Ethnic Myths” of the “Heroic Age” and of “Regeneration” (65-68) to argue that these films are surprisingly similar, from their presentation of the “natural” hero and the oddly similar military victory over the villainized enemy, to their use of magical realism and self-orientalizing, to the image of the beloved, which serves as a metaphor for the nation itself. As I will argue, it is precisely the film’s “fictional mechanisms” (or how the narratives are constructed) and the “social mechanisms” behind them (or the intended audience reaction), as defined by Pierre Sorlin (2001), that made these films “epic failures” at the box offices, despite their high production values. For both Kazakhstan and Russia, the failure of these films represents not only the danger of alienating audiences, by attempting to manufacture identity through film, but also a powerful, early lesson for their production of future memory projects.

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Abstract

The image of women was one of the most prominent in early Soviet mythology and was designed to eradicate pre-revolutionary conceptions of femininity. In Central Asian cinema, the figure of the “liberated woman of the East” emerged as a symbolic opposition to traditional ways of life. Early Soviet films frequently centered on a woman’s transformation from a victim of the old (traditional) life into a “new woman.” Through mise-en-scène, costume, and narrative resolution, these films constructed new models of female behavior and introduced new moral norms, modes of thinking and speaking, and everyday practices, as exemplified in Muslim Woman (1925), Second Wife (1926), Jackals of Ravat (1927), The Veil (1927), The Leper Girl (1928), Without Fear (1972), and Fiery Roads (1977–1984).

After independence, post-Soviet rhetoric permeated Central Asian cinema, as filmmakers turned to the reassessment of Soviet history and collective memory. Films revisiting the Soviet past sought to offer alternative perspectives on pivotal historical moments and the social movements that shaped women’s status. In this context, cinema critically engaged with the legacy of Soviet modernization, highlighting tensions between ideological reform and cultural tradition (The Speaker (1999), Her Right (2020), 2000 Songs of Farida (2020), etc.).

This paper examines Soviet and post-Soviet representations and interpretations of the “new woman” in films, short videos, and documentaries. It argues that women’s bodies function as key cinematic sites where ideology, historical memory, and competing models of femininity are visually negotiated across different political epochs.